Place
ITL Top floor meeting room, ITL Building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS. Information on how to access the school can be found at http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/contact-us/.

Speaker
Hanna Pamuła

Title
Acoustic monitoring of birds migrating at night – A pilot study on Baltic Sea coast

Abstract
Every year after breeding season billions of birds migrate to their winter destinations. Majority of bird species are nocturnal migrants. Popular bird monitoring methods, such as observations and bird ringing, are very limited during the night, so there is a need to develop other techniques. Acoustics monitoring can provide the information about bird species passing by during the night.
Five recording stations were deployed on main bird migration route on Baltic Sea coast (from mid-September to beginning of November 2016) with the aim to study passerines birds. Representative recordings were scanned manually to confirm that certain bird species utter calls during their night flight. Then several detection methods proposed in literature were implemented and tested. Two automatic bird voice recognition software were applied as well. Preliminary results and problems occurring in data acquisition and signal processing will be discussed during the presentation.
The results show that automatic analysis of nocturnal migrants voices may become a complementary method to study bird migration.